Author: Ian Crosby

Cloud Native has been around for a few years now, but 2018 was the year Cloud Native crossed the chasm to go truly mainstream. From the explosion in the number of projects making up the CNCF landscape, to IBM’s $34 billion purchase of Red Hat under their Hybrid Cloud division, the increasingly wide adoption of Kubernetes, capped off by CloudNativeCon in Seattle with eight thousand [...]

DORA, the DevOps Research and Assessment team, have recently released their 2018 State of DevOps report. An intensive collection and analysis of data on the usage and application of DevOps across organisations, including containers, orchestration, and cloud native practices. In this series of blog posts we will take a look the some interesting findings within the report and how they relate to [...]

At Container Solutions, we specialize in cloud native strategy and technologies. What that means practically is that on a day to day basis our engineers and consultants are working with organizations to assist them with cloud native transformations. From analyzing and understanding their current state to building a roadmap, architecture, and strategy, to implementing proper cloud native [...]

Last week, at the GOTO Conference Amsterdam, I gave a talk on how Kubernetes is in the process of crossing The Chasm. As in, the notable (and perilous) gap that exists in the Technology Adoption Lifecycle spectrum between early adopters -- who are willing to invest sweat equity in new/developing technologies -- and mainstream users looking for a turn-key solution with a mature feature set and [...]

“The stuff that I used to play with in my free time is now what I do day to day.” --- Ian Crosby, aka Captain Canada: Container Solutions Engineer Alignment: Lawful Good. Captain Canada would use his superpowers to enable others to shine. I enjoyed studying Computer Science in university, but I was worried that the jobs themselves might be repetitive and boring. At Container Solutions [...]

I recently had an interesting project building a proof of concept for a cloud based platform. The PoC is composed of a few services, a message queue and a couple simple UIs. All the pieces are containerized and deployed on Kubernetes (GKE). As a final task before sending this over to the client, I needed to expose the front end publicly. What seemed like a straightforward task turned out to [...]

In my previous blog post we set up a Continuous Integration pipeline which created dynamic, ephemeral environments in Kubernetes. This was done exclusively using Kubernetes namespaces. As mentioned in the previous post this solution leaves some holes, specifically around security. There are some basic questions which quickly arise: How do I ensure that my CI server doesn’t accidentally [...]

In this series of blog posts, I will highlight some strategies and tips when adopting Kubernetes. The goal is to provide practical examples based on usages of other companies who have already gone down this road. --- When adopting a new technology, such as Kubernetes, we often plug it in, use the basic features, and continue our development process as usual. However, in many cases we can [...]

Monitoring is a crucial part of any production application, and it’s importance is increasing as we move towards cloud native. For all the benefits of distributed, microservice applications, there are challenges which come along as well. The complexity of the system has increased considerably. The number of pieces involved (applications, datastores, services, etc) has multiplied, and they are [...]

Can a fleet of customized drones improve your daily commute? We recently connected with the Swiss meteorological gurus at Meteomatics who have developed specialized drones to collect and transmit weather data. We teamed up with them to find out the benefits of their new technology and what sort of issues it might be able to solve. The Problem Why is it that weather predictions, as we can all [...]